Video 7:18
Jimmy Pike Trust launched

Pat Lowe, the widow of legendary Indigenous artist Jimmy Pike, has established a trust to help other Indigenous artists.

Transcript

In the burgeoning Aboriginal art industry, there's one artist who continues to make headlines, even after his death.

Jimmy Pike, one of the last nomads to walk out of the the the Great Sandy Desert, became famous in the 1980s after taking up art while serving a prison term. Tonight he is again breaking the mould, with the launch of a trust which will use funds from his estate to help other Aboriginal artists.

The trust has been founded by his widow, Pat Lowe, who shared a big part of Pike's colourful life, including three years living at his bush camp in the desert.

Claire Moodie has story.

CLAIRE MOODIE, REPORTER: At this gallery in Perth, organisers are making last minute touches to an exhibition with special significance...

....special for the two artists involved, it's a rare chance to exhibit outside their home turf in the Kimberley and a mission accomplished for others.

PAT LOWE: When we were planning our wills, and I was explaining about wills and he said he would probably spend all his before he died and I said well you'll have a future income as well from royalties and permissions and that sort of thing. So I mentioned the possibility of a trust and he liked that idea.

PAT: Good morning, how are you.

CLAIRE MOODIE: Pat Lowe has travelled down from Broome to launch the trust which helped make it happen. Pampirla Hanson Boxer and his son Edwin Lee Mulligan are the first artists to benefit from the Jimmy Pike Trust, set up on behalf of her husband, who died in 2002.

PAT LOWE: Jimmy started off as a Bushman, you know grew up in the bush. And here he is leaving his money to other Aboriginal artists. It must be unusual, yeah.

CLAIRE MOODIE: The trust is just the latest chapter in a story painted on a very different canvas. Jimmy Pike was among one of the last groups of his Walmajarri people to come out of the Great Sandy Desert in the 1950's....Walking from a traditional life... unchanged in centuries....to the modern world. It wasn't until a few years later when he was serving a prison sentence in Fremantle that he turned his hand to art.

DAVID WROTH, JAPINGKA GALLERY: It was a very independent statement, it was saying this is who I am, this is where I come from, this is what my art looks like this.

It was certainly the first time I had seen anything like it.

CLAIRE MOODIE: David Wroth was blown away by Pike's natural talent when he ran a print making class at Fremantle prison in the 1980s......so impressed that he set up a company to sell the artist's vibrant designs on textiles and fashion accessories, products that were sold worldwide, even at Harrods in London.

DAVID WROTH: He would do things that were very traditional, he would do things that were just narratives from his own life. Anything was within his grasp and that was extraordinary because that to the best of my knowledge and for a remote Aboriginal artist this was story telling of a different calibre.

CLAIRE MOODIE: But it was Jimmy Pike's relationship with English prison psychologist and writer Pat Lowe which added intrigue to an already fascinating story.

(excerpt from ABC report in May 1990)

PAT LOWE: It was a bit like Eden, that may sound cliched but it felt a bit like Eden just wandering around in the bush....

(end excerpt from ABC report in May 1990)

CLAIRE MOODIE: After getting to know him in prison and forming a bond, Lowe spent three years living with Pike in the desert when he was released on parole.

PAT LOWE: No I never wondered if I was doing the right thing, I don't think.

I knew it wasn't the right thing!

In a way.

CLAIRE MOODIE: Did you ever have doubts is what I mean?

PAT LOWE: Not once I was there. Once I was there I certainly had a lot of doubts before I went. But once I was there it just seemed so right. I remember we kept laughing. I arrived and Jimmy wasn't expecting me really. I mean he hadn't been told I was coming. And he comes out of the bushes with his rifle saying who's there? Who is that, he says.

CLAIRE MOODIE: It was a shared sense of humour which led to one of the pair's many collaborations, this children's book about Native Title in which the Queen visits Pike's traditional country. Almost like life imitating art - the pair were later invited to a garden party at Buckingham Palace.

PAT LOWE: We saw the Queen, she comes walking down between lots of adoring subjects and then after that you have a cup of tea and something to eat and then I would have been happy to stay around but Jimmy said "alright, well let's go now, as long as we been seen her with our own eyes."

CLAIRE MOODIE: But despite travelling to exhibitions worldwide it was their time spent together in the bush that Pat Lowe remembers most fondly.

PAT LOWE: It was certainly turbulent....we used to argue over killing turkeys for instance. Like I didn't mind him of course I mean understood that he was a hunter and he was getting the meat. And he'd shoot a turkey but when he shot too many turkeys I used to get upset.

When we were hunting together, we went hunting just about every day and we'd walk for miles and miles and there was great satisfaction in that but always just sitting quietly and he was painting and I was writing and we didn't need to talk and on a nice day, it was very pleasant.

CLAIRE MOODIE: It's with a sense of relief that seven years after his death Pat Lowe is finally fulfilling one of Pike's wishes. Tonight she's officially launching his trust at the opening of this exhibition.

The culmination of a two week long artists in residence program funded jointly by the trust, Edith Cowan University, and the old Broome Lock Up Gallery.

PAT LOWE: He was never precious about his work. No he did once say, I did ask him once I said "do you think you're a good artist?" and said "yes". And I said "so how do you know you're a good artist?" and he said " well people buy it."

CLAIRE MOODIE: While art didn't make Jimmy Pike a rich man it certainly made him financially independent, something that Edwin Lee Mulligan, Pike's grandson, would also welcome.

EDWIN LEE MULLIGAN: He looked at some of my drawings and he said maybe you will become famous like me one day. I don't know.

Maybe....

that...time will come.

CLAIRE MOODIE: In the meantime, Pat Lowe hopes the trust will mean that many other Aboriginal stories can be told.

PAT LOWE: One thing to remember Jimmy and something that he's given besides his art of course, he's given his art the the world, I mean it's not a huge amount of money but to help people have opportunities that they might otherwise not have had.